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French Cabbage Soup

A hearty soup made with cabbage, pickled pork or bacon, onions, carrots, turnip, celery, and bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

French Cabbage Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the soup

  1. In a large saucepan, bring 1 gallon of water to a boil.

  2. Add 2 pounds of streaky pickled pork or bacon and 2 pounds of white cabbage.

  3. Include 2 chopped onions, 1 chopped carrot, 1 chopped turnip, and 1 chopped head of celery.

  4. Boil for 3 to 4 hours until the pork is tender, skimming off any fat.

  5. Season with black pepper, brown sugar, and coarse sea salt as needed.

Serve

  1. Place 1 pound of sliced bread in a tureen and pour the soup over it.

  2. Cover the tureen for 10 minutes to soak the bread before serving.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Cabbage + turniptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together897 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Turnip + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Streaky pickled pork or bacon
Adds savoury, fatty flavour that seasons the broth as it simmers.
White cabbage
Provides the main bulk and body of the soup as it softens in the broth.
Onions
Build a sweet, savoury base of flavour as they cook down into the broth.
Bread
Soaks up the hot broth, becoming soft and giving the soup substance.

The step that matters

Skimming off the fat during the long boil. Fat rendered from the pork rises to the surface and can make the broth greasy and heavy if left in. Removing it during the long simmer keeps the soup clean-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, cabbage, carrot, turnip, celery, pepper, sugar):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, cabbage, carrot, turnip, celery, pepper, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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